The Twitter Bot Made for Trump’s “WITCH HUNT!” Moments

Donald Trump’s default tone on Twitter is unhinged, but, even by that
standard, some tweets are more unhinged than the rest. On Tuesday
morning, just before 8 A.M., after tweeting a series of quotes from Fox
News guests doubting that any collusion took place between the Russian
government and the Trump Presidential campaign, the President
tweeted,
simply, “WITCH HUNT!” He did not elaborate.

It’s for moments such as these that the Twitter bot account @RealPressSecBot was made.
Created in June, by Russel Neiss, a software engineer in St. Louis, @RealPressSecBot automatically logs Trump’s tweets and “transforms them
into correct Presidential statement format”—meaning a White House press
release template, with a header, an elegant black horizontal “rule” to
divide the space, a date, and, finally, the President’s statement
itself. The bot has a hundred and twenty-six thousand followers. “This
is perfect, this is literally why this bot was set up,” Neiss said by
phone on Tuesday afternoon, at a time when Trump’s “WITCH HUNT!” tweet
had more than fifteen thousand retweets, while @RealPressSecBot’s “official” version had eleven hundred. “What the bot does for me is it reminds me this is not normal.”

Neiss spends an hour or two—“tops”—working on the bot each month, and he
doesn’t follow the President’s account, so the bot is how he hears from
the Commander-in-Chief. The bot was inspired partly out of recognition
of Trump’s ability to “maintain control of the media narrative, to jam
it,” and to try to “culture jam a little bit back.” The news lately has
been packed with headlines about malicious Russian bots, and Neiss said
he is pro bot transparency. He thinks platforms like Twitter should
disclose which tweets are bot-created. His own bot is pretty
transparent, though—the word “bot” is in the account name—and that
doesn’t totally prevent bot-inspired weirdness. “Every once in a while
I’ll search for replies to the bot, and I’m shocked by how many people
reply to the bot,” he said. “People talk back to it as if the bot is the
President.”